"I remember going to the CPR station
when it was so jam-packed it was
elbow-to-elbow people because there
were so many trains."
LARRY ZABOYSKY
Hotel manager, Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan
we can barely manage 21 miles an hour.
"Now we suffer," he says.
I'm not suffering. North American com
merce doesn't get much more basic than
trains and grain. And here I am, in a big old
locomotive, hauling grain west across the
plains of Saskatchewan, one of the great
wheat-producing regions of the world. And
this train is part of the most romantic and leg
endary of North American railroads: the
Canadian Pacific, the steel spine of Canada.
"No one who has not lived in the west
since the Old-Times can realize what is due to
that road-the C.P.R.," wrote Father Albert
Lacombe, a missionary who helped pacify
Indians while it was being built. "It was
Magic-like the mirage on the prairies,
changing the face of the whole country." So
I'm here listening for the echoes of that old
magic -to watch the grain move from the
prairie to the sea, to feel the thunder of
engines and the roll of steel wheels under my
feet, and to understand the strength and the
trouble in a very old partnership between
farmers and railroaders that's as underval
ued, yet as fundamental to North American
life and business, as the bread we eat.
Kf
HIS IS RATED some of the best farm dirt
in America," Bill Bell says. He's
stopped whistling. He must be feeling
calmer. He is the good host, telling me
about the landscape he has worked in for 21
years. "There's that Saskatchewan gumbo,"
he said, pointing at dried mud beside the
rails. "It looks hard as cement, but if you
throw a seed of grain on it-bluiee!"
The train rocks along the Tyvan Sub. The
cab is a small room with a power-control con
sole on the right and seats for conductor
The work of MICHAEL PARFIT and DAVID ALAN
HARVEY appears regularly in NATIONAL
GEOGRAPHIC. They collaborated once before, on
"Powwow: A Gathering of the Tribes" in the June
1994 issue.
and brakeman on the left. The engine roars
and whines, wheels screech on curves, and
there's a spit and hiss of pressurized air. In
the lowering sunlight the ties are in shadow,
but the wheel-polished rails catch the sun like
water and seem to float out ahead of us, free
of the ground.
"The Lord said, 'Let there be Wheat,' "
the humorist Stephen Leacock once wrote,
"and Saskatchewan was born." Sun, rain,
dirt, and farmers here produce 55 percent of
all wheat planted in Canada-an average
of about 16 million tons a year: 30 tons a
minute. Much of this is exported-with an
increasing tonnage going to the United States.
But since the U. S. also produces wheat, this
set off a heated dispute between the two
countries over trade limits and subsidies.
That battle is a microcosm of the volatile and
contentious world grain market, in which
NationalGeographic, December 1994